The present invention relates generally to storage systems and, more particularly, to remote copy systems and the ease of use of technology of remote copy systems.
US 2007/0079088 discloses technology to provide the server with one virtualized storage which has one or more physical storage systems connected mutually. In particular, the technology realizes the use of the resource of other physical storage systems by connecting with each other. Furthermore, the unique ID for storage area (volume) is provided in a virtualized storage system (one or more physical storage systems). The unique ID is called global volume ID. Thus, even if a volume is moved between physical storage systems, the volume ID which is provided to the server is not changed.
US 2008/0034005 discloses virtual storage systems. Many products of storage systems have remote copy functionality for disaster recovery. The remote copy functionality copies the data stored in a primary storage system to a secondary storage system. An operator has to do preparation for the secondary physical storage system, including creating copy destination volume, remote copy path configuration, and the like before initializing remote copy.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,680,919 discloses technology relating to virtual servers. This is a technology to create one or more virtual servers on one physical machine. Moreover, the patent discloses technology to move the virtual server between physical servers.
A volume creation in the conventional virtualized storage system is operated in the order of volume creation in the physical storage system with local volume ID, setting of global volume ID, and providing the volume to the server. As such, an operator has to be aware of the physical storage system for configuration. A technology to determine a physical storage area automatically is not provided based on specified global volume ID. Therefore, the operation cost is high. Furthermore, since it does not take into consideration virtualized storage system beyond the data center (DC), there is no technology which chooses the physical storage system installed in an optimal data center (for example, physical storage system installed in the same datacenter in which the server is installed). If the conventional virtualized storage system is applied to the multiple data center environment, the processing beyond DCs will occur. This causes performance degradation and consumes the network resource between DCs.
The conventional remote copy is configured using two sets of storage systems. Therefore, when applying the conventional remote copy to the virtualized storage system environment simply, the remote copy is configured using two sets of virtualized storage systems. In this case, settings of remote copy are needed for two sets of virtualized storage system. In particular, the settings include wire connection between physical storage system, a setup of I/F (interface) for data transfer, creation of copy destination volume, recognition of volume ID of copy destination, and the like. If virtualized storage system environment beyond data center is realized, remote copy functionality can serve as local copy functionality in that environment. Further, wire connection and a set up of I/F for remote copy will become unnecessary if there is connection for virtualized storage system. In addition, creation of copy destination volume will become unnecessary if the storage system automatically creates the volume by using virtual volume technology. Also, recognition of copy destination volume ID will become unnecessary if IDs of copy source volume and copy destination are made the same.